Asphodel
by The Hobbit's Rhapsody
Summary: Hades looks at the woman he has captured…or captivated?…and does not recognize this feeling. What do mortals call it? Hope? — Oneshot. Companion piece to Seeds.


**A/N: This is one fic of a duology—my fic "Seeds" covers mostly the same events from Persephone's perspective. Reviews would be wonderful!**

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Aside from the first moments of resistance, when my shadows snatched her from her dances on the hilltop, she has not struggled against me. I have crowned her, dared to set a claim on her, but I have not touched her. She still wears her own sky-blue dress; one of my servants stands near with a mantle, but she does not seem to feel the cold.

I dare to take this as a good omen. Early today I lit a fire in my hearth in preparation of her coming. So accustomed have I grown to the unwaning chill of my home, I had forgotten the pleasantness of warmth. As it slowly filled my house, I dared let it reach the thing within me that some poets refer to as a heart.

Seeing her now, _Perspehone_,_ here_, the twisting within me grows a little sharper.

My table was laid out for this occasion as well, set with every food I could think of that a girl might enjoy, especially the daughter of the grain-goddess. Fruits, vegetables, breads and broths of every color and taste sprawl across my table. This hall very rarely sees such a feast. A mortal lover of meat might find it sparse, but I have tried to please her with the best that I could find, without taking life. I am the god of the dead, she knows that; I do not wish to emphasize any brutal or cold portrayal of me by setting dead animals before her doubtless ill-whetted appetite.

She folds herself elegantly into the chair I provide for her, but makes no move towards so much as a stray garnish of the banquet. She gazes as if dumbfounded, or overwhelmed. Perhaps she's still in shock.

I split a pomegranate with one hand and set it before her, ready for the taking.

"Please," I say, as welcomingly as I can through my own nervous energy, "eat."

She sits staring at the pomegranate on the plate I have set in front of her. This is the sort of hospitality offered betwixt mortals, not gods, and certainly not between the god of the Underworld and anyone who is not already his permanent guest. She's not a foolish girl; she must imagine I am trying to trick her.

In truth, perhaps I am. Would I be glad if she ate from my table?

I want her to know this place out of love, not from fear or the esoteric rules of my realm. But if she does not stay at all, I will never have a chance.

Attempting to reassure her, I liberally butter a slab of rye and force myself to chew at the edges, though there is no hunger tugging at my belly. She watches me wide-eyed. The light playing across her skin shifts as her hands clench in her lap.

Her gaze drops away from me. There is a long wait in which neither of us speak, and my attempts to eat become less and less resolute. Just as I am fearing I have webbed myself into a corner, acted too impulsively to possibly expect a happy result, Persephone moves.

She dips a finger into the fruit and it comes out damp with seeds, stuck to her skin. A pensive crease shadows her brow as she gazes down at them.

The crown of silver and bone, shaped like a chain of flowers, that I placed on her head holds her long russet hair back from her face. Her tresses hang like flower petals, curling slightly where the fall ends near her waist.

I realize how small she is, how white. She is not usually so pale—the pink is gone from her cheeks; somehow she is more beautiful without it, even though I would not have her withered by the darkness. I have embraced the eternal twilight of this realm to which my brothers condemned me, but I do not know how to teach someone else to thrive within it.

Standing in a sudden, graceful movement, she breaks the quiet. "Let me see your face."

The sound of a feminine voice in my hall patters hard against my chest. I could not refuse her even if I wished. I stand, too, and release the ever-present kingsmantle of mist that I wear like a second skin. I had forgotten until now that it would prevent her from seeing me fully, that it might be a hindrance in my quest to welcome her. All the same, I try not to shudder as I draw it back; it is like exposing my bare skin to the winter cold in the midst of a hurricane, if only for the first instant before I adjust to the feel of her gaze on my face.

My would-be bride watches me with curiosity, her fear draining gradually away as the minutes pass. We _have_ met before, though it has been some time, and she was but a babe. She probably has some bleary memory of it; she is divine, eidetically minded, though it is locked away where she cannot bring it to mind easily. Technically I am her uncle—not that that is of much consequence among our kind. We do not share the biological struggles of mortals, nor the limits placed upon them by such. I can see a hint of my brother in her—the gleaming blue eyes, the aquiline nose—but she more resembles her mother, in face and figure. But Demeter lacks Persephone's curiosity, her vivid intensity, her poise. _Her innocence_, I think, and something catches in my throat.

If I take anything from her, it will be by her choice alone.

And then she makes that choice, in one quick movement—her finger slips between her lips and down to her lap again, the pomegranate seeds vanishing in an eyeblink. My breath skips, my insides clench in one fierce shudder as I realize what she has done. Willingly, knowingly, she has eaten from the table of the King of the Underworld, and bound herself to me for eternity.

If it is enough.

She has consumed so little that Zeus could reverse the law, if Persephone asked for it, if Demeter asked for it—which she will, when she finds her daughter here. Six pomegranate seeds. It is almost a tease, except that I do not think Persephone is one given to teasing of that nature. One thing she did not inherit from my brother, I _know_, is a love of suspense, and the cruel power that stems from it.

Her deed done, she makes no further move. She merely sits, delicate and elegant in every line, staring at me with wide eyes, as if she could read my thoughts.

She is not clamoring to stay.

But she has not run—is not running.

I feared that being here, in my domain, out of the sun, would turn her to paper. If I thought I would lose her, I would turn her loose. Instead of wilting, however, she stands steady. Perhaps her father's lightning frolics in her bones.

"What do you want of me?" Her voice does not quaver. Bright eyes fix on mine, stern and serious.

Beautiful. Does she know how beautiful she is? How she moves me?

"I wish to make you a home," I blurt it out in a whisper.

"Can you make me stars?" Her words stumble over each other, her uncertainty blurring them. "Is there a sky here?"

"Come," I say, and hold out a hand for her to take. There is a pause, and then she sets her small fingers on my forearm. I swallow as her warmth scalds me.

We walk out of the great hall side-by-side. The geography of my land shifts, always drifting around the endless globe of dusk, with my palace as its axis. I am fortunate in this moment; the place I seek comes soonest to us. I halt at the top of a cliff-face, behind a lip of stone that curves up before us like a balcony from which we can oversee what we have sought for.

Tartarus, the torment of the wicked, lies far off to our left, but that is someplace I will never take her, save at her command, and that only when I have earned the right to protect her. Elysium, dwelling place of the blessed, exists farther out, closer to the sun and sky of their once-home, but it was not the day of the underworld she asked to see. She asked after the stars.

My domain stretches out beneath us: the home of the mortal dead. What we see from here are the Asphodel Meadows, the great hollows carven with flowers beyond count, dim but content. Among them—glimmering, glittering, lazily orbiting one another in the idle half-dreaming conversation that neutral mortals are sentenced to, the blessing of those who have not earned eternal clarity by either great or terrible deeds—are the souls. They are pinpricks of pure light, silver mostly, with a hint of color here or there, making all the meadows behind them seem like a flowery silhouette of ink, a canvas splashed with the legacy of those who pass from dust unto dust.

Persephone draws in a breath; her delicate hands curl around the rail and she leans forward ever so slightly.

She is enchanted, as I had hoped she would be…as I was once, the first time I saw it. I try to imagine it now as she sees it, and for a moment I am caught between memory as old as time and the soft, intent presence at my side.

_I am the Lord of the Dead. _I hear a voice from long ago that must be mine speaking, and I want to answer it for her sake: _but I am not myself dead._

We stand together a little longer more. The quiet between us is almost…companionable. I do not want to break this reverie, even though the twisting in my heart has spread to my stomach and I begin to wish had been more daring, more overt, in my attempt to keep her here. Six pomegranate seeds? What am I to make of that?

Just as I have almost determined to turn to her, ask her outright to stay, to profess these foreign things occurring within me, we are interrupted. Cerberus' barks and snarls are suddenly echoing through my house, warning me of an immortal visitor trying to cross the horizon between life and death.

_Demeter_. She comes rattling at my gates. Screaming, though her vines and flowers and stalks of grain cannot penetrate mere shadow, for her daughter.

Already speaking, explaining aloud what is happening, I turn to Persephone, who wears an expression equal parts bewilderment, fear, and relief. Her head is turned upwards, towards the sound; her bone-and-flower tiara tips sideways; her hand reaches up to adjust it, unconsciously.

Without thinking, I take her other hand in mine. She turns to face me, startled, but not with the feral, struggling bearing of a wild animal trying to free itself. Her face slackens for a moment, eyes widening so slightly as she gazes at me. She nibbles the edge of one slim lip.

I cannot read the thoughts going through her head, so I stand and let her take me in. She is even less now the fragile thing I once saw from afar. A bit of sunlight has crept back into her skin and hair, making the cobalt veins streaking her arms less prominent. A flutter of gold rims the asphodel crown.

This was never entirely my decision to make, I realize; nor was it hers. Fate has toyed with us, woven our strands in a twist all too common for the tales of the gods.

Persephone is a goddess, a god's daughter and soon to be a god's queen. She will go for a time to the world above mine, back to the arms of Spring and Summer; she will carry them back to the land of the dead, and kindle them at last in me.


End file.
